Catholic Bucket List #7: Pray the rosary

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “Catholic Bucket List” item, so here’s a simple one:

Bucket List Item #7: Pray the rosary

There is really nothing quite so iconically Catholic as the rosary beads. As soon as you see someone with a rosary you know that they’re Catholic…or maybe a rapper trying to look cool.

No beads

Given that the rosary is so quintessentially Catholic, it’s rather odd that I didn’t pray it growing up. I think I regarded the rosary as “something which girls do”. This attitude probably came about because I didn’t know of any men who prayed the rosary regularly.

As a result, I don’t recall taking up a set of rosary beads until my early twenties. I prayed it a handful of times, and quite liked it. However, it was a little after this that I began my anti-Catholic phase, meaning it was several years more before I picked up the beads once again…

Doing it my way

To this day, I’m still not sure exactly what it was that made me start to pray the rosary again. All I can remember is that I started taking a rosary with me to work. It was given to me by my mother years before and I would use it to pray during my fifteen minute walk to the office each day.

However, even though I had started using rosary beads again, I didn’t pray the prayers of the rosary straight away. I developed my own way of using the beads. Instead of Hail Marys, I would pray the Our Father and use the decades to meditate on the Ten Commandments. After a little while, I started praying the Beatitudes, in what I would later dub the Kingdom Rosary.

Becoming a mama’s boy again…

At about that time my theology concerning the Blessed Virgin was starting to shift, particularly through reading books like Hail Holy Queen.

I eventually came to the point where I was considering praying a “proper” rosary. Like Scott Hahn, I prayed a prayer to Jesus beforehand, asking for His forgiveness in case I was doing something of which He didn’t approve, asking for some sort of sign to stop me from praying it ever again. I prayed a rosary and meditated on the Joyful mysteries and after a little while soon felt at home with this new devotion 🙂

Since that day the rosary has become a staple part of my prayer life. I own three rosaries which are distributed between my bedroom, my backpack and my office desk. I have a wooden rosary which I bought for myself years ago and two others which were generous gifts from friends.

After some time, I discovered the Divine Mercy Chaplet, something I wish I had discovered during my more anti-Mary days, as it would have been a more gentle introduction. If you’re uncertain about praying the rosary, this is where I’d suggest you start.

I particularly like to pray the rosary while I’m on the go walking somewhere. In fact, I measure my various lunchtime options in terms of decades: the sandwich store is two decades, Whole Foods is three, Chiptole is a whole rosary 🙂

Go on, spend some time with your mother.